HAVE YOU READ A ROMCOM THIS SUMMER?
It’s not too late for one last summer read, to make the season last. I began my summer with @Francesca Bossert’s wonderful romcom, Just Like A Movie and it was the perfect beach read. I wait all year for those summer reads, something lighter and frothier than the type of reading I do in fall or winter. And invariably that includes a romcom, the kind that takes you by the hand and with two really great characters destined to be together and all the plot twists the author conjures up for them, at last they get their big “movie” moment.
Add humor to the mix and I’m going to keep lying on my beach blanket, sunburn be damned. Just Like a Movie kept that promise. Set in Ibiza, with newly divorced heroine Gemma, 37, flying to Ibiza for the bohemian, creative lifestyle she’s always craved, escaping the airless marriage that kept her captive.
When the novel opens, she’s just getting settled on her flight from Barcelona when Cupid decides to put her heart throb in the seat next to her, the gorgeous Spanish superstar singer Emilio Caliente on whom she’s long had a crush. As the story unfolds, it had a little of the flavor of the 2024 film, “The Idea of You” starring Anne Hathaway, but Gemma is entirely her own person and she makes me laugh and feel for her predicaments on every page.
It’s Gemma’s first-person voice that grabs me, like your funny, self-deprecating, vulnerable and totally relatable friend. She’s endearing. And so I’m rooting for her all the way as fate has a field day in throwing rocks at the Emilio-Gemma romance.
The novel made me laugh out loud and rip through its pages to find out what happens next. My favorite element, though? Just like Francesca herself, it has so much heart.
Review posted today by AMY BROWN, on Substack